'Right here. Right now. Tell me: would you rather live, or just exist?'

For a man intent on escaping his past, a chance meeting in Vietnam with an American journalist looks like the perfect way out, but it is just the beginning of an adrenaline and testosterone-fuelled plunge into a world of danger and desperate men.

Dragged into a seedy underground where Russian roulette is an everyday rush and life is very, very cheap, he finds himself taking on the journalist's identity – and his girlfriend.

But soon his new ID gets him in way more trouble than it's worth. The boundaries between reality and hallucination blur and the body count mounts as he's forced to flee to Cambodia and, eventually, to Australia.

Rush, Daniel Mason's debut is a blackly funny and highly charged novel.